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“In the first years after the war ... Europeans took shelter
behind a collective amnesia.”

- Hans-Magnus
Enzensberger.

In his robust case for a liberal Euro-scepticism, A
Grand Illusion? (1996), Tony Judt robustly debunked an
oft-repeated myth about the post-war rebuilding project in western
Europe. From the very start, rather than being part of a carefully
planned attempt to reshape the continent by deliberately sabotaging
nation-states from above, (with the eventual goal being to unite the
entire continent under one umbrella European super-state), initial
moves after the Second World War towards greater European cohesion
were, in fact, the logical result of quite distinct national
concerns. These concerns only converged in shared European projects
by force of convenience. As Judt points out, post-war European
cooperation was

“a fortuitous outcome of separate and distinctive
electoral concerns, economic interests, and national political
cultures, it was made necessary by circumstance and rendered possible
by prosperity.”

In particular, the war of 1939-45 had the lasting
consequence of giving the continent something else in common:

“a
shared recent memory of war, civil war, occupation, and defeat... The
shared experience of defeat points to another common European wartime
experience: the memory of things best forgotten... Hitler’s lasting
gift to Europe was thus the degree to which he and his collaborators
made it impossible henceforth to dwell with comfort on the past.”

Almost every European participant emerged from the Second World
War having lost. The shared perception of a necessity for deliberate
historical amnesia in post-war Europe, for forgetting the traumatic
recent past, was thus one of the most significant points of
convergence between nation states that helped legitimate the new
European project. Cooperation was imperative, and part of this
cooperation was the tacit agreement between nations as to the
importance of ignoring their own roles in the madness of the war that
had just ended. At the very most, if not forcibly ignoring, countries which tended (some still tend) to absolve themselves of as much
responsibility as possible, to trumpet exaggeratednational
myths of resistance to fascism. The phenomenon is observable in
France, (formerly West) Germany, Belgium, Poland, Italy: such methods
were considered something like an existential necessity, necessary in
order for states to get over the Second World War as cohesive units.

It is only since 1989 and the end of the Cold War that a more
complex, honestly realistic picture of the European inheritance has
emerged, and even now it’s clear that many countries are still far
from looking their own troubled histories directly in the eye.The official French line, for example, shared by a majority
of the French people, continues to exaggerate the significance and
size of the French Resistance, and underestimate the completeness of
Vichy France’s submission to fascism, and its horrendous
consequences. There’s a salutary lesson to be taken from a charmed
visit to Paris: its state of flawless architectural continuity was
paid for at the price of submission to the Nazis.

In its capacity as a candidate country of the European Union,
Turkey’s
refusal to come to terms with the Armenian 'events' of
1915-16 is often cited as a clear example of why the country is
unsuitable for membership. However, the opposite could well be true.
Far from having to recognise these events as 'genocide' in order
to adhere to established European norms of historical
account-settling,Turkey’s continued denial of the
Armenian 'events' should rather be seen as an advantage,
recommending it as an entirely suitable European candidate. Following
classic post-war European form, perhaps Turkey’s historical amnesia
should be seen as one of the key criteria that it fulfils in its wish
to be defined as an authentic European state!